URGENCY OF THE HOUR - IFCA International

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equal time to skills and character development. That means the teacher must budget huge amounts of time with the trainee in ministry and one-on-one discussion outside the classroom. Adding a few classes to our church program will not produce the leaders we want. Imagine the potential! What if every Christian leader in America took it upon himself to be a mentor to just one other man? Immediately we would raise both the quality and quantity of full-time Christian workers. 3. Leaders Define Outcomes - It is the responsibility of leaders to define what future leaders should look like. Once we have articulated our outcome, we can then develop systems to equip the next generation. If we think a missionary must be good in the pulpit, then our training strategy must be designed to produce public speakers. Missionaries who apply to BMW are examined in three broad areas. By the time a person applies to a mission agency, it is assumed he will have met certain standards in the following areas: a. Character - The qualifications for leadership are carefully outlined in passages such as I Timothy 3, 2 Peter 1:5-7, I Peter 3:1-13, Titus 1:5-9, Titus 2:1-10, Galatians 5:22-23, and 2 Timothy 2. b. Academics - We work with objective Truth. Future missionaries need to know the Word of God, as well as many of the disciplines accompanying the study and ministry of that Word. Through written and oral exams, we help local churches determine the academic preparedness of future missionaries. c. Skills - A missionary must have certain ministry skills to be effective in service. We have identified fifteen skill sets that we feel today's missionary should have. They are: · Discipleship · Evangelism · Exegetical skills · People skills · Counseling · Administration · Strategic planning · Writing · Communication · Time-management · Personal and church finances · Language aptitude · Cultural awareness and sensitivity · Computer skills · Conflict resolution These skills will not be developed in the classroom. A mentor must go shoulder-to-shoulder in real-time ministry with a trainee. Perhaps the missionary with inadequate pulpit skills could have been helped if a mentor had listened to him speak fifty times and critiqued each message. This is time-consuming, but it will produce a public speaker. Without this commitment to preparing the next generation, we will continue our reticence to opening our pulpits to missionaries. And we may be sending missionaries to the field who are destined to a life of frustration and possibly failure. The primary responsibility of a missionary is to reproduce himself. Yet, most of us went to the mission field without ever being discipled. We never had a mentor. We never saw leadership training take place in a local church, so we never experienced the very thing we are supposed to do best. It would greatly enhance the success rate of missionaries if there were churches and pastors who were showing the way.
If you are a Christian leader, you are the answer to the need for competent replacements. You may be the missing mentor. Paul Seger serves as the General Director of Biblical Ministries Worldwide. He grew up as a missionary child in Nigeria. After graduating from Appalachian Bible College and Faith Baptist Bible College, he served as assistant pastor in Community Baptist Church of Reidsville, North Carolina. In 1975 he was accepted as a missionary with Biblical Ministries Worldwide. In March 1994, he became the General Director of Biblical Ministries Worldwide. They presently live in Atlanta, Georgia. Joan has a ministry to missionary ladies, missionary kids and churches in the United States. The Segers have two children Ryan and Joanna. Building Partnerships For Global Outreach Rev. D. Paul Williamson The opportunities of global missions continue to be a challenge and a privilege for the local church in the new millennium. As the global community seems to become more and more connected through technology and world travel, the paradigm of building international partnerships with national believers for the cause of Christ is becoming a reality for the missions outreach of the Honesdale Gospel Tabernacle of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. This building of international partnerships for the cause of Christ is a paradigm of global mission outreach that has been developing within our church family over a period of years. The concept was introduced by former pastor Stephen Young and continues to be developed and expanded under the leadership of the current pastor, D. Paul Williamson. Today the Honesdale Gospel Tabernacle has formed church planting and global outreach partnerships with two international fellowships of believers, as well as a partnership for the planting of a daughter church here in northeastern Pennsylvania. We have established a partnership in the country of Ukraine with Vasily Shevelenko, a Ukrainian church planter who currently is planting a third congregation of believers in the region of the Kherson oblast, and more recently with Naw Mai Maru from the country of Myanmar, a "closed country" to traditional missions. As the task of global missions looms before the church there has been three major paradigms that have shaped the local church's involvement in global outreach. Supporting Paradigm The first is the "Supporting Paradigm," or perhaps more commonly known as "traditional missions." This is still the predominate model and normally is traced back to the establishment of "modem missions" and gained predominance following World War 11. Within the perspective of this paradigm the role of the local church is understood to be primarily a financial supporting of selected missionaries serving with a chosen mission board or agency. As the local church participates in global outreach, they look to the mission agency for the agenda of global missions. This paradigm will always have a place in the total picture of a local church's global outreach. Sending Paradigm A second is the "Sending Paradigm." In this model of global outreach the local church takes on a more aggressive involvement in the missionary's life and direction of a ministry. Instead of maintaining a supporting role, many churches in the 1980's increasingly began to assume a sending role in world missions. This model has opened a way in which local churches have moved from a dependent mode to an independent one in their relationship with mission agencies and boards. This model is often limited to large congregations who can assume the responsibilities that a mission agency often fulfills on behalf of the local church. Because of the demands of the "Sending Paradigm" upon the local church this model of
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URGENCY OF THE HOUR - IFCA International

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